The New Brunswick Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal from a Workers Compensation Appeals Tribunal decision after concluding that the worker was largely asking the Court to reweigh competing medical evidence. Maureen Bell had an accepted workplace injury involving an exacerbation of pre existing migraines and musculoskeletal pain. The dispute concerned whether that accepted workplace exacerbation continued to be the dominant cause of her inability to work. The Appeals Tribunal concluded that it did not and ended Bell’s entitlement to loss of earnings benefits for the relevant period. Bell appealed to the Court of Appeal. Her arguments challenged how the Tribunal had dealt with the medical record and the conclusions it drew from conflicting evidence about the continuing effect of the workplace injury. The Court emphasized the limits of an appeal of this kind. Where the real disagreement is about how a tribunal weighed medical evidence, an appellate court does not simply perform the weighing exercise again.
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